Lesley Dill: I See Visions
Lithograph on Muslin, Silk Organza with Hand-Sewn Elements
28 x 20 in. 2004

New York artist Lesley Dill’s work is showing at the Equinox Gallery in Vancouver (ending March 31st). An artist friend and I eagerly went to see it a couple of days ago and were not disappointed. This is the first time I’ve seen her work, and wished I’d known it sooner since so much of it resonates with me. The gallery website shows her amazing pieces, so have a look.

Here’s a wonderful review by Robin Laurence in Straight, beginning with this:

Language, fibre, body, and spirit–all weave together in this exhibition of new and recent work by New York artist Lesley Dill. Deeply poetic in both impulse and content, Dill’s interdisciplinary art–which includes photography, sculpture, printmaking, and performance–also manages to invoke a number of theoretical concerns. These include the ways in which gender is socially constructed and the body is inscribed with language. Not that we’re overwhelmed by post-semiotic ideas as soon as we walk into the gallery; the first impression here is one of sensuous beauty.

It is all very compelling work. Her delicately layered prints on muslin and silk organza, such as ‘I See Visions’ (above), ‘Listen’ and ‘Blue Voice’ are very inspiring and timely for me while working on my own series of layered prints.

Dill has done a lot of her prints at Landfall Press:
Lesley’s Dill’s images and constructions explore the nature of the body and its clothing. In particular, her work uses metaphoric imagery to explore the role of language in cloaking or revealing the human soul.

And at Graphicstudio:
… Lesley Dill is on the forefront of the trend in contemporary art of using visuals with language, lending an edge to their fusion by peeling away stereotypes to create a fresh and unique vision. Widely acclaimed for her sculptural, print and installation works which draw upon the poetry of another American woman artist, Emily Dickinson, Dill combines the word with the image, the fragile with the indestructible, the handmade with the computer-generated. A meeting of art and poetry, her works are rich in texture and temporal associations, evoking elusive, layered meanings.

More images can be seen at Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle and at artnet.